Trust in the Digital World

Questions about trust in the digital world are being posed more and more frequently: How are we going to handle the issues of integrity and surveillance? How are we going to handle the measurable traces that result from our digitalised presence? What is it that determines which services we can trust and which we cannot – to what extent does technical security play a role? Similar questions can be posed about which knowledge institutions we trust, or ought to trust – such as academic research, which is also undergoing change and is challenged in the digital age. Paradoxically, images and physical representations are becoming more important in the digital world. That is why we are bringing together the results of the DigiTrust research project in book form.

DigiTrust is the name of the interdisciplinary research group at the Pufendorf IAS, which between September 2013 and June 2014 devoted itself to trust issues from a digital perspective. The group consists of ten researchers from five faculties and was led by Per Runeson and Stefan Larsson. In brief, research in the DigiTrust group concerned three main areas: 1) Security and integrity – which services and players do we trust, and why? 2) Which knowledge institutions do we trust or distrust in a digital context? 3) Surveillance and data storage as a legal and public trend, where is it heading?

In addition to the seminar-based work of this interdisciplinary project, in which different research traditions wrestled with, and adjusted to each other, the members of the group participated in panel discussions, radio programmes, written opinion articles, and blogged and tweeted as a way of being involved in the public debate. This book offers a selection of the analyses that the group made, presenting both the research perspectives and the researchers and, not least, the results from the survey that the group carried out in 2014 on digital trust involving 1,100 Swedes. You can read more at digitalsociety.se